The invention relates to grill tongs, comprising two rods, which are movably connected and which can be pivoted relative to each other and which each have a gripping surface for an item to be grilled at the end of the rods near the grill and which are equipped with a handle at the end of the rods far from the grill, which handle is used as a contact surface for the fingers of a user.
For cooking sausages, meat, so-called kebabs, that is to say pieces of meat ranged on an elongated skewer, or other foods, a well-known and widespread technique is to lay them on a grill, which is disposed at a very short distance above a heat source, such as a charcoal fire. The heat radiated by the charcoal fire and, to a lesser extent, air heated by this fire, heats the item to be grilled to its interior and produces a crust on the outside, which is regarded as tasty complement to the through-cooked inner region of the item to be grilled.
The temperature resulting from the heat source must be high enough for the cooking process to take place within the item to be grilled. This temperature is so high that it would burn the hands of a user who touched the item to be grilled directly. It is therefore necessary to use a tool for placing, turning and removing the item being grilled. For this object, inter alia, tongs or scissor-like tools are widely used. They consist of two rods at the ends of which facing the grill, two gripping surfaces are arranged, with which the item being grilled is contacted and picked up. At both other ends of the rods, handles are disposed or integrally form, with which the user picks up and moves the grill tongs. Due to the length of the rods, it is achieved that the user's hand assumes a distance from the heat source. The radiation intensity of the heat source decreases with increasing distance. However, a restriction is that such an intense heat is radiated over the entire surface of the grill that meat can be cooked at all points. That also leads to the fact that despite the great distance of the users' hand from the surface of the grill at all points of the grill, injuries are nevertheless possible if the distance of the users' hand from the grill surface is still relatively low.
In the prior art, German patent DE 196 22 352, Steubing, describes grill tongs that comprise two L-shaped elements that are connected via two articulation points to form an L-shaped tongs unit. Though it is thereby achieved that the user's hand is no longer in the radiant range of the grill, but the resulting construction is relatively large and cumbersome, as a result of which the user always has to manage a very large mass compared to the item being grilled. This not only impairs the subjectively perceived comfort, but, as a result, the positioning accuracy achieved with the unit is unnecessarily restricted, which, ultimately, can result in a non-uniformly cooked grilled item.
To avoid the disadvantage of the excessively long rods of this grill tongs, other solutions are known, which only propose very short rods, with which it is possible to achieve satisfactory handling of the item being grilled. However, because the user's hand can come into the radiant range of the grill, the utility model DE 20 2005 014 573, Schluch, proposes that the handles of the grill tongs are covered by a heat-protection shield. This heat protection shield is intended both for the new equipping as well for retrofitting of already-used grill tongs. It consists of a box-like enclosure of the user's hand with a slit for pushing through the tongs. However, the user must resolve for himself how to connect this plate to the tongs such that in the most unfavourable case he not only has to pay attention to the movement of the item being grilled but also to the fact that that the heat shield doesn't shift or even fall down.